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Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

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Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#231

Post by marmarama »

nomel wrote: post #201
6SixTy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main issue is the lack of Vulkan support on macOS. Currently, solutions like MoltenVK have to be developed to add Vulkan support, which isn't as clean as just supporting it. For some reason the prospect using Wine, Rosetta 2, and DXVK with MoltenVK on top just to run some games doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that this whole thing will be performant and/or stable.

No, the main issue is a fundamentally different rendering pipeline (tile based deferred rendering) that makes "Vulkan support" a conceptually difficult square peg in a round hole problem, since everything is made for immediate rendering, like all the other mainstream GPUs use.

Loads of GPUs with Vulkan support use TBDR. The Adreno GPU in the Steam Frame's SnapDragon SoC, for one.

There is also a Vulkan driver for the M1/M2 GPU already, used in Asahi Linux. There's nothing special about Apple's GPU that makes writing a Vulkan driver for it especially hard. Apple chooses to provide a Metal driver only for its own reasons, but they're not really technical.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#232

Post by bee_rider »

tombert wrote: post #229
adverbly wrote: post #98

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not.

No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#233

Post by kelseyfrog »

lukan wrote: post #226
kelseyfrog wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anisotropic mouse movement? Or perhaps the 0ms-80ms distribution of mouse movement matches the >80ms mouse movement distribution within some bounds. I'm thinking KL divergence between the two. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test for two-dimensional data? There's a lot of interesting possible approaches that can be tuned for arbitrary sensitivity and specificity.

Like another commentor mentioned, I think that only works for a specific cheat(engine) - as long as they don't adjust (and randomize more for example). If it could be solved with some statistics, I think it would have been done already. I ain't a statistician though, but if you feel confident, I think there is quite some money in it, if you find a real world solution.

To be sure. There's at most 6 frames of data per event to work with at 60fps. It's an interesting problem and well suited to statistics.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#234

Post by tombert »

craftkiller wrote: post #199
adverbly wrote: post #98

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

That is why I bought a steam deck: to financially support Valve's Linux efforts. I barely play games anymore but thanks to the Wine devs, CodeWeavers, and Valve, I no longer have to listen to the knuckle-draggers claiming that "Linux sucks because it can't play games". In fact, now it is the opposite: Linux is outperforming Windows[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJXp3UYj50Q

I have a near infinite amount of respect for Wine. It seems like for at least the last twenty years, Wine just keeps getting better and better with every release.

I don’t know for sure, but I suspect a lot of the work is spent sussing out weird edge cases with different binaries. This is tedious, thankless work, but it is necessary to have true Windows compatibility.

Wine and Proton have gotten so good that I don’t bother even checking compatibility before I buy games. The game will likely run just as well or better than on Windows and it is so consistently good that it’s not worth the small effort to check ProtonDB.

I do wish that they would get Office 2024 working on Wine. This isn’t a dig at the Wine devs at all, I am sure that it’s a very hard problem, but if I can get that then I will have even more ammunition to get my parents to drop windows entirely.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#235

Post by adverbly »

tombert wrote: post #229
adverbly wrote: post #98

Everything valve doing for linux is making such a huge impact. The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

I mean you're completely correct.

But if we treat all companies the same regardless of their behavior, they don't have any incentive to change their behavior.

So I'll keep rewarding the good behaviour and punishing the bad.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#236

Post by Hikikomori »

reactordev wrote: post #54
ZiiS wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works in the sense it allows you to run the game; but it does not prevent cheating. Obviously, Window's kernel anti-cheet is also only partially effective anyway, but the point of open-source is to give you control which includes cheating if you want to. Linux's profiling is just too good; full well documented sources for all libraries and kernel, even the graphics are running through easier to understand translat…

These things do not prevent cheating at all. They are merely a remote control system that they can send instructions to look for known cheats. Cheating still exists and will always exist in online games. You can be clever and build a random memory allocator. You can get clever and watch for frozen struct members after a known set operation, what you can’t do is prevent all cheating. There’s device layer, driver layer…

They do prevent some cheating methods on Window, like blocking other processes from reading/writing game process memory.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#237

Post by bee_rider »

oarsinsync wrote: post #164
Ylpertnodi wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc).

> Unfortunately for Linux, the recent ram price increases are reason not to move (if thinking about a new pc). Can you elaborate on why high RAM prices mean Linux is less attractive? Do you believe a usable Linux environment uses more RAM than a usable Windows 11 environment?

They are assuming you’d build a new machine for Linux, I think.

OTOH Windows 10 support ran out recently so I guess there are a lot of unsupported Windows machines that could be perfectly fine as Linux refurbs.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#238

Post by jsheard »

cyberax wrote: post #134
reactordev wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other options exist but it’s not an option for these real-time games like FPS’s. I get it. If you don’t need real-time packets and can deal with the old school architecture of pulses, there’s things you can do on the network to ensure security. You do this too on real-time UDP it’s just a bit trickier. Prediction and analysis pattern discovery is really the only options thus far. But I could be blowing smoke and know…

> But I could be blowing smoke and know nothing about the layers of kernel integration these malware have developed. Kernel level? The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state. There are now also purely external cheating devices that use video capture and mouse emulation to fully simulate a human.

> The SOTA cheats use custom hardware that uses DMA to spy on the game state.

And the SOTA anti-cheats now use IOMMU shenanigans to keep DMA devices from seeing the game state. The arms race continues.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#239

Post by tombert »

bee_rider wrote: post #232
tombert wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Proton and I like Steam and Valve definitely has done a lot of good for the FOSS world, but let’s not make the same mistakes we made with Google by worshipping a company. All it takes is new management to change the policies to make the company horrible and evil, and in the case of Google people made the realization far too late, and now Google owns too much of the internet to avoid.

Valve seems more like Apple than Google: a well-liked company that has an obvious and not inherently exploitive business model. Google as an ad company was always destined to go bad in a way that most non-ad companies are not. No company is your friend, and they are all fundamentally structures around making a profit. But providing goods and services in exchange for money is not inherently exploitive or evil.

Oh I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s perfectly fine for a for-profit company to do things for profit, and Valve selling games and creating tooling in which to do so isn’t inherently bad.

That said, I can think of a few things about Valve that are kind of bad, such as normalizing DRM with games. Linux people (including me) have historically been pretty anti-DRM, as they should be, but because everyone loves Valve we were all excited to get Steam on Linux, despite the fact that Steam is DRM.

Re: Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm

#240

Post by brain_staple »

strbean wrote: post #197
hamdingers wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They decided to make it a prequel for fear of not living up to the name, the decision was made much earlier. If you're at all familiar with the contents of Alyx and the Half-Life franchise it wouldn't have made any sense to call it HL3.

Ah, haven't gotten the chance to play it yet. But the same implication - we'll need someone at Valve with a big enough ego to take up the mantle.

I don't think that's how the people at Valve think. These people usually have lifetime dreams to work at Valve well before they do because they admired those early games so much, which if you know the story were held up to very high standards internally and repeatedly. They spent their lives being hyper critical of their own craft and admire Valve because they don't a release subpar product as a rule. So collectively they'll have a LOT of collective ego tied up in whatever that product is, but it's not like "I own this", that would be highly anathema.
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